I don’t want to be a Spanish major who hasn’t traveled to Spain. You can’t become a doctor without working in a hospital and you can’t be a chef who has never cooked a meal. It’s the same thing, really.

How much can you learn about culture and history from books? A fair bit, but it all comes to life when you can see something with your own eyes.

My upcoming six-week trip to Barcelona, Spain, was a combination of fortuitous events colliding with impeccable timing. At a time when I needed to find something to fill my summer days, I checked the summer abroad Web site on a whim and found the deadline to apply for the program had been extended. I got the paperwork together in a rush and before you knew it, I had a plan.

It’s an intense academic program, which I like and need to complete the Spanish major I have yet to declare. It’s about five hours of classes, including a grammar lesson and a history/culture class taught by the supervising professor from Northwestern. Elisa Baena runs the Spanish Writing Center here and has edited a few of my papers, the most memorable of which was about a cartoon vampire movie.

With all the book learning at school, my Spanish language skills are getting a bit rusty. I can’t wait to brush up on my conversational Spanish, which was whipped into shape during a high school trip to Mexico several years ago. I’m a little nervous about everything coming together, because the big picture is all there but the details have yet to be hammered out. At least I finally made plane tickets — I’ll be en route to Barcelona at the end of Finals Week.

The dorm of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra is near Barceloneta, literally just blocks away from the beach on the Mediterranean coast. We are taking one group trip to Madrid and I might have a friend or two come visit me in Barcelona. I’m flying out with my dad, who is coincidentally on his way to a business meeting in Morocco, so we might check something out the first weekend we get there. My goal for the trip — lots of photos.